Podcast

Weekly shows every Tuesday – since 2013!

Topics:

-In a rarity, Joe and Sam are recording without Jerry

-Joe is in the state of Washington and they discuss the possibility of meeting up on the west coast

-With all of the security features and changes with new hardware, the guys discuss the need to get your hands on current hardware to make sure you as a consultant are familiar with changes in behavior.

-Sam has a saga to share about issues related to his own computer. He spins a yarn to take listeners through every gory detail, including:

Reinstall from recovery

Using dscl to create users

Recreating/deleting .AppleSetupDone

Choosing Spanish as the language

Recreating the user account

Changed UID back to 501

Deleted /var/folders/zz

-Sam wonders if Joe has realized that he had forgotten something in preparation for his trip

Patience is a virtue. Or at least it's a learned skill in our business. End users don't always know when to "wait it out" and let a process complete.

-Joe was having an issue importing contacts for a client and fields that were not supported in Exchange. Another issue was making a contact listed by company instead of First Name/Last Name.

This week we are proud to be sponsored by FLEXdesk, an offering from our friends at Rooted Consulting. FLEXdesk - Help Desk support that grows with you

Topics:

-Joe has some questions about content caching and working with multiple WAN IP addresses. Sam makes an attempt at discussing while on the road.

-Sam encounters an issue when attempting to download a full macOS High Sierra installer. With content caching enabled on another computer, the App Store only downloaded a small 15 MB file. Only when turning content caching off would it download the full installer.

-Jerry is in the midst of a remodel in his home office so he talks about the struggles of being uprooted and moving equipment

-He recommends theTP-Link PowerLine Adapters as a good alternative to ethernet when that’s not possible:https://amzn.to/2N6vX6P

-After Jerry was talking about how an Apple TV reset worked to correct issues, Joe suggests a change in our motto to “Have you tried resetting it?”

-Quick tip from Jerry about a client that took their Mac into the Apple Store and were told that it needed a new logic board. He saves the day by unplugging the battery and the client is ecstatic that it turned on again.

-A reminder from Jerry to have your clients put reviews on Google or Yelp

-Joe has some Safari gripes to talk about. At times, when clicking on a link in Apple Mail, it will open a new tab in one of his minimized windows in the Dock. Jerry wonders if it’s more of a peeve than a gripe.

-Another annoyance is making exceptions to invalid certificates in https sites. He also noticed that the password dialogue box is for the current logged in user’s credentials. Sam thinks this is because it is placing an exception in the user’s keychain. Jerry wonders if it’s a router’s config page with an expired certificate. An older version of Firefox is the workaround.

-Joe attempts to hold Sam to his keychain thought and he cannot verify as he is careening down the highway at high speeds

-A connection to John Gruber and Daring Fireball - he declares the Menu Bar as the Mac’s greatest invention. Joe says Command+Tab is the greatest keyboard invention. Sam wonders what came first, Command+Tab or Windows key+Tab?

-Sam has been working closely with a client to develop a proof of concept to roll out iPad Pro devices and finds challenges with the Microsoft Office products for iOS

-He has also had a very positive experience working with the business team and their measured approach when selling products to the customer

-Joe finds it funny that one of Sam’s solutions is to use Web Clips, an idea that Steve Jobs himself described as a “sweet solution” 11 years ago, a fact that John Gruber periodically jokes about

-In our “I should have known this” segment, Joe realizes while attempting to do a backup that he cannot backup using Time Machine to an APFS volume. He also finds that he cannot encrypt a Time Machine destination after completing an initial backup.

-Jerry has some follow up from the 10,000 Songs on Four Wheels Show and using the “Fuzzy Slipper Method”, coined by Jerry himself. He talks about needing WAN access when setting up a network for a customer in your office.

-Joe has a straight WAN port in his work bench area so he can truly setup a network for clients using unfiltered access

-Joe calls back to Dan Benjamin & Merlin Mann and how he used to listen to them constantly

-We had the pleasure of sitting in on Jeff Porten’s presentation at ACEs 2018 and he has a new book out in the Take Control Series. The book is called “Take Control of Your Productivity” https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/productivity

-Right up to the start of the show, Sam was working on an iPhone with water damage with a good friend of the family. An odd situation came up with relation to iCloud backups. Jerry has a suggestion based on an old trick to resolve Time Machine backups. Stay tuned to the next show to find out what happens!

-A pet peeve of Jerry's is when he might shave off some time to be nice. A client pays and then keeps you around to enter information in the register, delaying you even more.

-Sam recalls that awkward moment when a client was opening a safe in front of you and trying to make sure you aren't able to see

-As Jerry is running, he listens to podcasts. He shares another pet peeve for playing sound effects that scares the heck out of you while running on the road.

-Working with SonicWall is nothing new to Sam but he had a moment of frustration setting up the SSL VPN client on Windows 10

-While on the Windows topic, Jerry has problems with a computer that ended up being Windows Home Edition

-The dreaded employee or friend that gives a client bad advice that makes them second guess you

-Jerry deals with Windows 5?? (Windows NT) and trouble with UPS

-Sam shares a funny story about hanging out with Adam Rice at ACEs and learning that Reachability actually does exist on the iPhone X! Chalk that up to something he should have known.

-We have probably all been there before: Jerry talks about a client that swears that a feature existed before when it actually didn't.

-The team at Mac Geek Gab recommend Elclecticlight.co to find, among other things, a 32-bit app checker for macOS.

-Cocktailis a great utility that Joe highly recommends. A recent tip by the makers of Cocktail talk about the Reading List being available offline is not on by default. Enable it in Safari Preferences>Advanced pane.

-Etrecheck gets further discussion as Jerry talks about how he has used it in the past

-Joe has some follow up from our pal Tom Bridge of the MacAdmins Podcast, among other things. Tom had some insight into the "Too many corpses" error Joe was getting a few weeks back.

-Blog posts are a huge driver of traffic to your site and Jerry gives some blog and social media tips

-Speaking of blog posts, our friends at the TidBITS Content Network. They can help fill in that gap of having new and relevant content on your site since we constantly run out of time.

-One Time Secret is a site used for a secure method of sending information like passwords to your clients:https://onetimesecret.com

-All this talk about passwords brings to mind a great Jimmy Kimmel bit asking people on the street for their passwords: https://youtu.be/opRMrEfAIiI

Thank you to our sponsor, Phone.com. Flexible, cost-effective communications & collaboration solutions for small business and entrepreneurs starting as low as $9.99/month.

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Topics:

Command Control Power is live at the ACEs Conference in Baltimore Maryland!

-Special thanks to Justin Esgar for inviting us to be a part of ACEs

-Joe talks about the excellent start to the conference with yoga and the first session of the work/life balance with Melanie Curtis

-We are now at 260 shows and counting

-A shout out to Michael of Origin 84 listening live all the way from Australia

-A huge announcement from our very own Joe Saponare! After much thought and planning, he is taking to the road with his wife Ashleigh. They will be traveling in their camper van for the next year or so. An amazing experience and we all wish them well.

-A question from the audience about Wi-Fi on the road. Joe talks about his AT&T and Verizon connections via a bonded cellular router. It brings to mind Al Franken on SNL.

-He will start by flying out to LA shortly and head off to the Pacific Northwest.

-Steve Sorbo offers an open invitation to visit him in Seattle

-Richard Wingfield asks how his clients are taking this. Joe is taking an approach of giving certain clients a heads up but not making a big announcement as of yet.

-Live support! Sam gets desperate texts from one of his employees during the live show. He is in the weeds with a Synology migration.

-Adam Engst of TidBITS Content Network has advice about making major changes like a new website or infrastructure and time to estimate to get the job done

-Alex Narvey of Precursor Systems brings up his favorite tip from the show, unlocking a user's session with admin credentials.

Using your preferred command line text editor, edit /etc/pam.d/screensaver change: account required pam_group.so no_warn group=admin,wheel fail_safe to account sufficient pam_group.so no_warn group=admin,wheel fail_safe Back at the lock screen, hold down Option & Return and enter the username of an administrator and enter the password. You will be granted access to the logged in user session.

-Justin Esgar comes up to discuss the day 2 schedule for ACEs. He also talks about the videos available to view all the amazing content from ACEs 2018 for just $299. You can purchase them here: http://acesconf.com/video

-Sam briefly mentions his decision to sign a lease for office space in CT

-This week we are proud to be sponsored by FLEXdesk, an offering from our friends at Rooted Consulting. FLEXdesk - Help Desk support that grows with you

Topics:

-Sam starts the show by discussing a recent rate increase he is introducing

-Jerry discusses timing of rate hikes

-While on the topic, Sam shares a story about tough negotiations with a particular client

-After an announcement from CrashPlan ending PROe Server for Mac, Jerry has to take steps to keep his server up and running for clients using Parallels and Ubuntu

-A brief talk about storing data in the cloud and FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt)

-"All my data is gone" - Sam recalls a story where a client fiddled with equipment and caused a minor scare for herself

-After replacing macOS Server with a Synology, Sam gets the dreaded ticket to report that items are missing. The story turns to an issue of illegal characters in filenames. An old favorite called A Better Finder Rename is brought in to do mass renames on the server.

This show is brought to you commercial free, thanks to our Patreon sponsors!

Topics:

-Sam has a big announcement - HCS has acquired office space in South Norwalk, CT! Pictures to come soon. The only downside is he can no longer wear his pajamas to the weekly meetings.

-Joe was hoping to have some follow up from listeners about the Downloads folder not being in the Dock causing hangs in macOS

-Jerry asks Joe for follow up from MacStadium about an IP block that seems to think its in Russia

-Jerry asks the crew about upgrading to TeamViewer 13 and Joe riffs on how "un Mac-like" TeamViewer is as an app

-Jerry forks over a few bucks for disposable booties to wear at clients

-The old crew discusses styles of young people today

-What to do when Face ID doesn't work?

-Lost VPN credentials have been a recent issue for Joe

-Sam discovers Rumpus for Windows! He may have been living under a rock but had no idea.

-Jerry has recently started working with Meraki products. He mentions how you can sign up for their webinars and get free gear as well as a three year Meraki license.

-"Joe's Tech Korner" is back as he talks about issue related to Apple Remote Desktop and issues connecting to a Mac remotely. Using quick thinking, he power cycled the switch remotely, which caused the computer to re-communicate with the network and allowed him back in.

-The group talks about an influx of spoofing emails appearing to come from Rackspace

-Sam runs across a situation where copying files using the Synology GUI was unbearably slow. He ended up enabling SSH on the Synology and used a host Mac to initiate an SSH connection and utilitized the cp command:cp -pr /source/directory/ /destination/directory/

-ACEs is just around the corner and the group shares some great quotes from previous attendees. If you haven't already, sign up for ACEs today!

Topics:

-This week's show is brought to you by FLEXdesk - your help desk support that grows with your company. Go to rootedconsulting.org/flexdesk to find out more.

-Jerry takes over Joe's Peeves Corner as he gripes about Apple Remote Desktop and its annoying habit of jumping to different computers when it is populating a list

-It brings up the topic of Addigy and their remote access client and its speedy and reliable access. Also Addigy's SSH/command line capabilities to perhaps kickstart Apple Remote Desktop.

-Joe talks about users enabling Printer Sharing. If users turn it on and people connect through it, changing the host computer's name in System Preferences>Sharing will cause shared users to no longer be able to use it.

-Continuing failed updates with High Sierra and the now infamous "missing or damaged" error

-It reminds Joe of a story where a client had a firmware password on a Mac that was acquired from a previous user. In a similar situation where the Apple Store could not/would not unlock it. They extracted the hard drive, installed it in another system and wiped/updated it. They then placed it back in the original iMac and it successfully booted.

-Jerry floats a conspiracy theory as to why these installer issues have been so rampant

"Joe's Tech Clinic" - After an upgrade to High Sierra, the Dock and Finder were slow to respond after booting each time. Subsequent downloads would cause the Dock to then be unresponsive, once complete. Joe attempted many fixes: resetting launch services, removing /var/folders contents (except zz), safe boot, resetting NVRAM, SMC, nada. Also tried trashing Dock preferences and rebuilt manually. A key was that the Downloads folder was not in the Dock. Unbelievably, adding it to the Dock corrected the issue!

-A nice addition to the show is additional audio from our interview with Justin Maxwell of smith.ai and Keypad. Justin talks about his time working for Apple.

-The rumor about being caught in an elevator with Steve Jobs turns out to be true!

-Joe remembers the time of the release of the Intel processor. At that time, Justin was part of the team building the iLife website (in Flash!). At that time, Adobe decided not to release Flash for the intel processors. Justin's team had to rebuild the entire website, working through holidays and weekends to meet a deadline. Released the morning of MacWorld, Steve Jobs hated it! Justin kept a little memento to remind him of that time in his life.

-Of the many things that Justin learned from all of this, Steve was almost always right. He always thought of the user first.

Justin Maxwell of Smith.ai and Keypad joins us for an incredibly informative and in depth interview. Most recently the design lead for Google’s Android Auto, Justin has designed products and built teams for Google, Apple, Mint (Intuit), Sony, and plenty of startups along the way. Here are two of Justin's offerings that we discuss on Command Control Power:

-Keypad is the most advanced & affordable cloud phone system for small businesses. Keypad offers call routing, call analytics, and many customizations to help you track your performance, and convert more leads.

-Justin takes us through not only the story of how he brought these businesses to life but his life at Apple as an interaction designer for Apple.com

-As we talk Smith.ai, Justin describes the look and feel of the site and how it relates to their customers

-Smith.ai acts as your virtual receptionist, to provide a layer between customers and your business. At the same time, they are able to weed out all of the spam or unnecessary calls.

-Justin was mint.com's first UX hire and gave him good perspective on small businesses and their needs

-Their team essentially followed around small businesses over the course of a Summer to figure out what their needs were and what they found was that phone calls were the biggest pain point

-Instead of being a brick & mortar company, they utilized VoIP technology and highly skilled employees working from their locations

-"It all starts with a phone call"

-Jerry can't imagine running his business without Smith.ai at this point. Even just not having to answer calls at client sites to try and make a sale

-Smith.ai's system uses machine learning to help the receptionists make the right decisions over the course of a call and provide the correct answers, versus reading from a script

-Joe & Justin discuss their easy to understand pricing as opposed to minute based pricing

-Keypad is an excellent complement to the Smith.ai service. Instead of using services like Ring Central, Google Voice or Grasshopper, which can add latency to a call, they developed Keypad.

Topics:

-Sam follows up on his experience at the ACN Road Show in Santa Monica, CA

-Sam shares a story from one of our listeners that recovered a stolen MacBook Pro with assistance from the police department

-In working with a client, Joe discovers that Find My iPhone was off. He also discussed enabling show last location, which is a handy feature.

-Sam tries to inject a new segment in the show, "Sam's travel corner"

-Jerry reminds us about taking a few moments to ask clients for an online review

-Jerry talks about an experience with a client that had a failed High Sierra upgrade - "macOS could not be installed on this computer" and used terminal to correct it:diskutil listdiskutil umount force /dev/disk1(Take note of your disk id. disk1 in my case)diskutil apfs convert /dev/disk1

-A client that politely declined Joe's monthly services plan ends up with an issue with data loss after a liquid spill and the Apple Store replaced hardware. PsiMac to the rescue: had her order the hard drive from Backblaze. It contained a full copy of her home folder, which brought her data back. Two fallout issues were Keychain related and the Photos library.

-A story you have to hear to believe - Joe's client has an issue with sending emails from Outlook and coming out as gibberish to receivers. After upgrading from Outlook 2011 to 2016, the issue remained. In the end, an errant carriage return in one of her contact names caused this formatting issue to occur.

• Joe and Jerry discuss the need to constantly reevaluate the optimal age of a Mac that might be a candidate for upgrade. When is it worth upgrading 2011-2012 iMacs?

• Jerry recommends the iFixIt Pro program for resellers to get a better rate on parts including the adhesive kit for 2012 and newer iMacs

• Jerry revisits the Mouse Jiggler app from Episode 246: Let Go Of My Echo or Echo Location that helped his Fusion Drive encryption proceed, and shares some excellent feedback from Tom Bridge re: encryption requiring the mouse to be moving. Tom suspected Apple is "using the entropy from the mouse cursor to do part of the encryption" which is apparently the case in High Sierra with APFS (although Jerry's drive was not APFS). See also: The Lava Lamps That Help Keep The Internet Secure

• installing MalwareBytes on High Sierra requires manually allowing the kernel extension to run by clicking Allow in System Preferences: Security & Privacy: General. It appears that it cannot be done using TeamViewer, or perhaps other remote access software e.g. Screen Sharing either. It must be clicked by a local user. See MalwareBytes forum posts 1 and 2

ACEs Conference was created for one reason and one reason only:To help IT consultants grow their companies.

With unique, premium content delivered by world-class speakers, ACEs Conference is the place for inspiration, ideas, business networking, and instantly-applicable knowledge. It’s no surprise that our attendees continue coming year after year—just one ACEs Conference and you’ll be sold.

We're sponsored this week by Watchman Monitoring, a favorite tool of ours that should be in every professional consultant's toolkit.

Visit WatchmanMonitoring.com/cmdctrlpwr and sign up for your free trial to find out how Watchman Monitoring can keep an eye on your client machines and notify you of over 100 issues. Be sure to tweet @cmdctrlpwr #CCPsentme to support the show!

Topics:

-Joe calls back to a 27" iMac hinge repair. Sam & Joe have both used https://www.themachack.com to hold up the display. But Joe references that Apple will reimburse customers with proof of repair.

-Joe's pop quiz: how is a shut down and cold boot different from a restart?

-Another new segment from Joe! How to think like a client?This week: Backups. A client wouldn't realize that the key to laptops backing up reliably is to plug them into power while they are open and awake, unless they support Power Nap (Dark Wake). The default setting is not to back up while on battery power.

-One of Jerry's clients has an issue where she thought all of her documents appearing as My Documents.zip. The explanation is something we have all encountered before.

-How much time have you spent assisting clients with downloading and running TeamViewer?

Command-Control-Power

Cmd-Ctrl-pwr is a weekly podcast hosted by three certified members of the Apple Consultants Network (ACN), drawing from nearly half a century of combined experience operating technology consulting practices.

Command-Control-Power is a weekly podcast hosted by three certified members of the Apple Consultants Network (ACN), drawing from nearly half a century of combined experience operating technology consulting practices.